Portrait of a Woman

The Bolognese friar Pellegrino Orlandi, in his dictionary of painters, wrote that Dionisio Guerri's pictures had once been plentiful in private houses but could no longer be found. They had been bought for the cabinets of great lords and taken out of Italy, where, he wrote, they would pass for works by his teacher Domenico Fetti, so well had Guerri learned to imitate him.

This portrait stayed. In Verona it belonged to Bartolomeo Dal Pozzo, the knight of Malta who wrote the lives of the city's painters, and later to the collector Cesare Bernasconi. The museum calls it energetic and almost harsh. The woman is dressed in black against a red background, and a stiff white collar frames her face and sets it off.